Buy an iPhone in China, get it jailbroken in-store

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Buy an iPhone from any certified distributor and you’ll get Apple’s cellphone locked to a network, or unlocked ready to accept a SIM. What you won’t get is the option to have your iPhone jailbroken in-store. There is the odd exception, though.

Visit China, however, and jailbreaking can be done at point of sale. China Unicom is the store to visit if you want this done as part of the buying process. Several unauthorized apps are also thought to be available as an install option by staff. They’ll even trim your SIM card for you.

At the moment the jailbreak service will be limited to previous generation iPhones as iPhone 4 has not been released in China yet.

Apple has yet to respond to the news, but will surely be contacting China Unicom about its in-store practices with Apple hardware.

Images of the jailbreaking service advertisements can be seen on the WeiPhone forums (translated).

Apple will want to kill this service as quickly as possible. Jailbreaking is easy to do now, but not that common. Having a store offer it as a service will certainly increase the number of jailbroken device, especially if it is a service charged for and therefore the store pushes it to customers.

Whether China Unicom care what Apple has to say is another matter. If customers are willing to pay for the service, and sales have increased since its introduction, then I doubt it will stop.

We would never see this happening in the West as distibutors know how much iPhone is worth to their bottom line. It’s just not worth getting cut off by Apple to even consider offering jailbreaking.